Collabora has released version 26.04 of CODE, the company's web-based office suite. CODE stands for "Collabora Online Development Edition" – "Development" indicating that this is a preview of what will be coming soon in Collabora Online, its web-based function-rich office suite. The announcement is Collabora staking its claim to a slice of the increasingly competitive online office suite market.

What's new

Depressingly, the first bullet point in each section of the release announcement – for the Writer word-processor, Calc spreadsheet, and Impress presentation module – is improved AI integration. We asked the company about this, and Collabora assured us that it's off by default.

"Basically, lots of partners and customers have been asking for the option for a while, so it was added, but we have ensured that people can decide whether or not to use it and how they use it. To be clear, AI assistance isn't present in the product unless you add it through File > Options or on the admin side through the server side settings panel."

As an example, Collabora noted that the EU's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) has AI all over it.

There are other functional improvements here as well as optional Automatic Idiocy. For instance, there's Markdown support. If that sounds faintly familiar, it may be because that was one of the standout highlights of LibreOffice 26.2, which we covered back in March. Writer now has a multi-page view; the "Track Changes" functionality has been enhanced in multiple areas, including comment handling. Comments can now be exported to PDF along with the main content. The Navigator sidebar now has search, and the Formatting sidebar now has inline preview.

The spreadsheet has per-user views, smarter formula error handling, calculated values in pivot tables – yes, the wider LibreOffice family does have pivot tables – as well as better formatting with bundled templates, colored tabs, better JSON import, lots of new, modern spreadsheet functions, smarter drop-down lists, and more. Impress presentations have been similarly revamped.

The various components' ribbons have been reorganized, and the suite makes better use of limited screen space. Effort has gone into making the suite more accessible, with controls having more descriptive names, descriptions added to the tabs of dialog boxes, lots more keyboard controls, and more. These improvements not only help users with disabilities: more and better keyboard controls help power users navigate much quicker too.

Family ties – and family feuds

Some of the changes and improvements are things that mirror recent improvements in LibreOffice, because there is substantial overlap between Collabora's office suites and The Document Foundation's LibreOffice.

There used to be a fairly clear split: the Document Foundation maintained two versions of LibreOffice – a current release and a slightly slower-moving stable release. LibreOffice is a completely local app, with versions for all the major desktop OSes.

For organizations wanting support, the Document Foundation recommended multiple independent vendors, including Collabora, which did a lot of the development work, and offered its own version of the codebase, Collabora Online (COOL) – the same codebase, adapted to work as a web app. You install and run it on a web server in conjunction with an online cloud storage tool, such as Nextcloud. CODE is a preview of what's going into the next version of COOL. We last looked at CODE in 2022.

The distinction between LibreOffice and Collabora Online became much less clear in November 2025 with the release of Collabora Office for Desktop, which is the COOL web suite bundled up with a local server and installer, so it can run on a standalone, non-networked machine (this is, incidentally, how ONLYOFFICE works: web apps, but running locally).

As we covered back in March, the Document Foundation has responded by reviving its web-based version of the suite, LibreOffice Online.

There's a fully local FOSS office suite (and, for completeness, the moribund OpenOffice), plus two online versions, one of which can also be run locally. The Document Foundation is in active competition with Collabora.

There is blood in the water of the pool where all the descendants of StarOffice swim.

Why here, why now?

When we looked at CODE in 2022, cloud office suites were something of a niche interest. Now, though, this sector is rapidly hotting up – especially since the re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the USA. That has ignited great interest in European digital sovereignty, as we reported from the Open Source Policy Summit in February (oh, and Microsoft is going to ax Office Online too).

There is money to be made here. Money from national and governmental organizations is even more tempting. Because those folks are the ones who print the money, there can be more of it: the public sector pocket is deep.

The FOSS world is always short of money. Selling FOSS to company directors who only understand payments and contracts is tricky: it doesn't work by the only rules they understand, as Andrew Nesbitt's article Open Source vs the Invisible Hand neatly dissects.

Selling FOSS to the public sector instead is an exciting new market, and it's resulting in a feeding frenzy.

Suddenly, European organizations are struggling to replace fleets of Windows desktops linked into American cloud tools. Wholesale rip-and-replace is a big undertaking, and expensive: even if the software is free, the labor isn't. One tempting alternative is to switch to locally hosted online services.

As we reported last October, Schleswig-Holstein did just that. In February, we reported on the French government opting for La Suite among other such changes.

One of the next big moves came in April, when Nextcloud and Ionos announced Euro-Office, a fork of ONLYOFFICE. The Euro-Office announcement highlighted the new suite's visual resemblance to Microsoft's offerings, and its embrace of Microsoft file formats. It also criticized the dated default look and feel of LibreOffice.

ONLYOFFICE was not happy, and suspended its partnership with Nextcloud. Collabora was not happy either. Even so, the Free Software Foundation endorsed the fork's legitimacy. ONLYOFFICE remained unhappy and in May released ONLYOFFICE 9.4 – with stricter license terms. As The Register reported when Euro-Office 1.0 shipped, The Document Foundation was not happy.

Dangling juicy treats over the heads of squabbling hungry vendors was never going to result in harmony and increased cooperation. Even so, as long as all the tools work and can read one another's documents, then all the different bodies and organizations will be able to talk to each other, exchange files, and keep working.

It is messy, and it will continue to be, but then, FOSS has always been messy, acrimonious, and reduplicative. Until the AI bubble implodes, this will continue. Then the hucksters will pivot to trying to sell us all quantum computing instead, and the government money will go toward climate remediation and geoengineering… and the bureaucrats will be left with whatever proves cheapest to deploy and run. ®